In 2010 the UK budget deficit (also ‘UK net borrowing’) was around £148bn. It’s now at £90bn (the next highest (hm, ‘deficit’ …lowest?) figure from 1979 to pre-crash 2007 was £50bn). But that’s what’s chipping away year by year. We are still getting further into debt by an annual £90bn.
Total debt, the National debt, is rising and has been since 2003. It’s currently at £1.56 trillion. It goes up by £2bn a week. As a percentage of GDP it’s less scary – post war it reached nearly 250%; now it’s about 81%. It was about half that 10-15 years ago.
But back to the yearly budget deficit book balancing. At debatable levels of ‘need,’ we need £12bn of welfare cuts.
Pensions make up half of the welfare budget, and they are protected. So where are the cuts going to come from? Child benefits! At least we know where the leaks are going to come from – the Lib Dems.
Thursday Next
So what is it? Austerity and those shameless welfare cuts taken to yet more unprecedented levels under the Conservatives, ‘everything paid for without any more borrowing’ from Labour, just as long as you don’t expect a timetable, ‘everything paid for by leaving the EU’ from UKIP – or something, ‘all the things Labour are scared of doing’ from the SNP, Lib Dems in the middle, or no cutting at all from the Greens (spending and borrowing, in fact – working/earning our way out of debt).
What are the questions being bandied about? Are they, in all honesty, your questions, when it comes to voting – if you vote?
Why won’t they say what they are planning? Has the government been competent with the economy? Would Labour be any better? Is there any difference between what the parties are offering? Do you want an EU referendum? What does the NHS need? Coalition threats. Would Nicola Sturgeon really create a sort of American cholesterol affair – where everyone’s blocked by everyone else’s intransigence in the House/Senate?
Will they/won’t they coalition options. Every leader and spokesperson’s giving love, hate and back again descriptions of their potential partners. Surely the oddest time to be making coalition threats is at the end of a five-year …coalition. In May 2010 the vibe of “no majority: it’s the end of the world and Jeremy Vine’s career as we know it” lasted right up to and through election night. Then the coalition started and we realized it’s more… ‘meh.’ We’re hardly milking fear of the unknown here.
But back then, because of all the apocalyptic wobbles and the tardy election outcome, the Lib Dems and Conservatives fought it out and, a year later, we got the compromise AV vote. That got a woeful response, with claims that everybody thought it was a terrible idea/was scared of it/couldn’t understand it. Though the BBC reckons it might have helped towards a Conservative victory next week had it gone through.
In any case, the polls aren’t predicting majorities any time soon. What is changing, exactly? Has the rise of the other parties taken votes away, preventing the snuggly, warm majorities the Conservatives and Labour once reached? Adding up the votes and seats for the ‘main two’ here:
1987: Con + Lab votes = 73.0% of the vote and 93.1% of seats (605/650)
1992: Con + Lab votes = 76.3% of the vote and 93.2% of seats (607/651)
1997: Con + Lab votes = 73.9% of the vote and 88.5% of seats (583/659)
2001: Con + Lab votes = 72.4% of the vote and 87.9% of seats (579/659)
2005: Con + Lab votes = 67.6% of the vote and 85.6% of seats (553/646)
2010: Con + Lab votes = 65.1% of the vote and 86.8% of seats (564/650)
[Guardian 30th April] 2015: Con + Lab votes = 66.9% of the vote and 83.5% of seats (543/650)
Well, going down I guess (and they seem to have consistently shared 98% of the seats from the ‘40s to 1970 – before pretty Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals started to show promise and then naughty old Shirley Williams and her Social Democrats broke free). But see: Tony Blair got a majority when Labour and the Conservatives only had 85.6% of the seats to vie for in 2005, yet there was no majority in 2010 when the parties shared 86.8%.
Labour won with 35.2% of the popular vote in 2005; the Conservatives didn’t win with 36.1% in 2010. Welcome to statistics.
And those winning figures – looking a little low? Remember GCSE level history and politics lessons, folks – first past the post can all too often mean that most people in the country don’t vote for the winning party. Blair’s best: 43.2%; Thatcher’s best: 43.9%; Churchill’s best: 48.0%. Welcome to democracy.
Have a seat. The possible loss of single party majorities here is not so much about the smaller parties leeching votes. Like it or not, it’s the number of seats that counts, rather than the percentage of the popular vote (it’s not like Strictly or X-Factor where things modulate with the judges’ scores/choices or whatever). 86% of the seats has been more than enough to generate a majority government before. 83.9% of seats was all there was to be had in 1931, but the Conservatives got in by a landslide.
It’s really about the lack of a clear winner/loser between the Conservatives and Labour. 1931 saw the Conservatives win 470 seats and Labour …46 (admittedly that marks the last outright majority in an election. 1931, kids – granny wasn’t even born). 2015 currently looks to be: Conservatives 276 and Labour 267. Welcome to symmetry.
Perhaps it’s the crucial swing seats that have gone over to the other parties and pwned the chance of a Conservative or Labour win – but then that’s what was wrong in the first place.
Because they haven’t changed much it means they won’t change. So we won’t bother electioneering or reporting politics there as much – that feedback loop where the current situation becomes the cause of the current situation.
It’s like people who don’t vote: the parties don’t rely on those peoples’ votes and don’t put their issues on the agenda, so then those people don’t vote, so…
Thursday Next
Informed choice. That’s got to be democracy. Let’s face it, a handful of soundbites and bad jokes from the respective parties’ giggling speechwriting pools isn’t doing very much to help.
Apathy. No winning majorities. It’s not because they are all the same. It might be because, once in power, policy gets hammered and flattered by legislative issues, circumstances and all the things that can crop up over five years – so every government turns out to be the same.
But there are differences between these parties and their many, many members’ hearts and minds, differences both generous, clever, noble, disingenuous, cynical and degenerate, and these are evidenced when they plan their manifestos. If you want to make a choice at the box-ticking stage it’ll only be real if you know what the differences are.
It takes minutes. Just run through a couple of apps. They ask a few questions and then give you your leaning towards each party based on their policies. There’s VoteMatch. There’s ISideWith. There’s Who Shall I Vote For?
Locally you can check through your candidates. And if you want to see your current MP’s track record then type your postcode into They Work For You. It’s nice and concise, too.
The apps/quizzes are also useful for showing what’s making the agenda and the narratives and questions policy gets formed around.
Cutting the deficit? Public service cuts? HS2? Skilled migrants? Tuition fees? Free school meals/winter fuel allowance? NHS/privatisation? EU? Capping emissions? Foreign aid? Bedroom tax? Zero-hours? Tax rates for rich? Capping rents? Help to buy?
And there are, perhaps, some surprises separating the parties:
No one should be imprisoned for possession of drugs for personal use
Do you support the legalisation of same sex marriage?
Should terminally ill patients be allowed to end their lives via assisted suicide?
Should the UK reinstate the death penalty?
Should the British Monarchy be abolished?
Answering the questions and getting my recommended parties, I was surprised by the percentage difference between the parties I tend to consider and the ones I do not – they are poles apart. The parties are answering policy questions very differently in their manifestos at least.
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